Overrection, French surralism and Latin American Magic Realism

"by creating the marvellous at all cost, the thaumaturgists become bureaucrats."

“When Alejo Carpentier wrote in the Prologue to El reino de este mundo [The Kingdom of this World] that “a fuerza de querer suscitar lo maravilloso a todo trance, los taumaturgos se hacen burócratas” (8) [by creating the marvellous at all cost, the thaumaturgists become bureaucrats],1 he was alluding to the extreme artificiality of some French writers, notably the Surrealists, and was introducing a Latin American literary phenomenon, which in the same essay he baptizes as “lo real maravilloso” (10) [magic realism]. Although the Prologue was written in 1949, others had already used similar terms to speak of the Caribbean2, but none met the fortune that Carpentier’s term would, perhaps because the immediate application of the theory was to be found in his novel. The term has become as artificial and cliched as the stifled Surrealism the Cuban novelist was denouncing, and one hesitates to employ it when referring to today’s literary works from the Caribbean because their diversity and their scope do not allow for such reductionistic labels. ”
quoted from
CARIBBEAN IDENTITIES RECONSTRUCTED AND REDEFINED
IN WOMEN’S NARRATIVE TEXTS:
MARIE CHAUVET, MYRIAM WARNER-VIEYRA,
AND ANA LYDIA VEGA
Mary Ann Gosser Esquilín
Florida Atlantic University